You’ve all been amazingly patient, understanding and supportive as we’ve worked through our list of tasks and solved our problems, but we are entirely delighted to announce that Empires of the Undergrowth will be entering early access on December 1st, 2017!

Early access brings an entire overhaul of the game – the biggest of which is Formicarium Mode, where you build an ant colony in a lab and upgrade it by playing missions out in the wild as different species of ant! There are four entirely new missions, two special challenges for your Formicarium, and you can explore the bountiful yet dangerous outworld above your nest.

This means the game will be for sale on Steam, and those of you who already have a copy (by backing the game or through itch.io) will be able to download it through Steam on this date!

It’s been a tough few weeks for our dev team. We’ve taken feedback from beta testers, worked through a huge number of game-breaking glitches, balanced, tweaked and tinkered. Obviously that won’t stop – when early access is underway we’ll still be listening to suggestions and responding to balance issues, whilst we begin work on the first new content for early access.

So you’ll all be building your formicariums and battling the critters of the undergrowth in two weeks. In the meantime, enjoy the epic announcement trailer!

As we steam ahead in our run up to early access May has seen many developments.

The process of putting a level together involves rapid iteration between our team members, and each level being added is more complex than any of the demo levels!

In putting these together, all aspects of the game have been affected. Here are some of the recent changes and updates to the game – please note that you’ll get your hands on these when we go into early access; there are no more planned updates to the demo.

Creatures

Models

Each level introduces an increasing pool of creatures. Formica rufa – the wood ant – has had multiple models added. These fulfil various roles in the colony from worker, to melee attacker to ranged attacker and the different models gives some visual representation for these. These have all required unique animations.

AI

Many of these creatures will follow the standard ant colony behaviour we have been developing from the start, however in order to make each feel both more realistic and unique a whole raft of new abilities and behaviours are being added.

Combat behaviour

Other creatures in the game will now have different behaviours to better reflect their natural tendencies. They can attack and fight furiously to the death, (which is what they do in the current demo), they can flee, they can ignore you or they might attack only in response to being attacked themselves.

Self-cast

Some abilities are not damage abilities and are instead buffs for the creature using them.

Ability triggers

Creatures can now trigger abilities based on more than just having an ability available to use. Certain abilities (such as the woodlouse bunker down) will be triggered when a creature takes damage, or when their health hits a certain level.

Totally Unique AI

Some creatures need to perform specific tasks and the default AI structure did not fit. These creatures have very unique AI and they may for example attack only when another creature enters their lair or they may target your colony’s eggs rather than the ants themselves.

Projectiles

Some creatures fire projectiles such as the wood ants below. Damage done by these is handled differently than melee abilities as there needs to be a check to see if it collided with its target.

Level design

With audio being added to the new levels, this needs to be triggered at certain points in the mission. This requires an extra careful approach to level design to make sure things fire at the right moment. That being said the maps themselves are coming together very smoothly. The tile-based tools we have developed to put levels together are really starting to pay for the effort that went into making them! Once the levels have had their basic design and gameplay pass, they can go to our art person to get them looking the part.

Game modes

On launch, early access will focus around one key game mode. This mode has a home colony (Formica ereptor) that the player keeps coming back to, unlocking upgrades and ant types to strengthen their home colony. To unlock these the player must complete other missions. Here the player can play as other ant colonies from nature in scenarios based on the natural habitats of those species.

During early access, we plan on releasing new species along with missions based around them that will allow you to further upgrade and personalise your home colony! With all this will come even more enemies, unique abilities and behaviours.

We have planned other game modes as well, including endless modes that get harder, survival-based wave modes and other more unique modes that we plan to add as early access progresses.

Interfaces

We want to deliver information to the player in an unobtrusive way that is easy to find out more should you want to. Most information in the game will be delivered through an in-game wiki with a search function. This will give both gameplay information and facts about the creatures in nature.

During play, the player will be given notifications when there is something new to read about. These can be ignored or turned off from the options menu and will open the wiki to give further info if the player requires it.

Additionally the whole home colony section of the game requires a unique interface to upgrade your colony and make other decisions.

Saving and Loading

In order to make the home colony work it needs to be able to be saved and loaded. We are still implementing this however we have made good progress – it’s one of the things we get asked most through our Stomt feedback page and we’re glad that we’re working solidly on it now.

Key Bindings

One of the most requested features are more hotkeys for interacting with the game world and interface, and a way to change those keys to a player’s preferences. We’ve taken some time to make all hotkeys completely rebindable to your liking from the menu.

This month a lot of work has gone into the interfaces and options (including key bindings and game setup and the groundwork for loading and saving). Additionally you should all have your steam keys! If anyone has a problem with their keys please do get in touch and we can help sort the issues.

We have finalised the voice lines for early access, found our voice actors and recorded the lines!

This update caused an unexpected revival of interest from streamers and YouTubers (especially as it included no new content). There was a lot of coverage on YouTube but here are some of the bigger ones:

Since releasing our first demo in Spring 2016 we have received mountains of feedback from the community, which has been constantly shaping the game’s core mechanics and features.We feel this has ultimately resulted in a better overall game and we want to continue moving forward with help and suggestions from players.A side effect of this iterative community focused development, is that whilst we have been putting more time into tweaking the game’s inner workings to create the ideal mix of ant colony realism and compelling gameplay, it has put us behind schedule in terms of producing a final product that we can label as “complete”.We are fast reaching a point where we are able to release something far grander than the original demo. However, while we are confident about the state of the game’s mechanics, and the amount of playable content (including the overground, new ant species and other creatures), there are additional game modes, creatures and abilities that we are still working on. All of these will need balancing, and that process works best with player input.It seems to make little sense holding back the game’s release for what could be another 8-12 months of development whilst we work on additional levels, and features. We would much rather continue our work in the same manner as we have done for the past year: with the help of our enthusiastic ant-loving community.

To some of you this will be welcome news, to others who are skeptical of early access titles, it may not be what you want to hear. We cannot avoid the fact that there is a lot more we decided to do with the game than we had originally planned for. We were left with options of releasing a rushed game, pushing back release (potentially to 2018), or continuing on in Steam’s early access. For those who still prefer to wait for the final game, please be patient, we will get there in the end.

The early access version will include four new stand-alone missions with unique creatures, music and narration as well as a “formicarium” story mode. This content will be beta tested before we release in early access. Over the course of early access, we plan to introduce new content as blocks of complete missions, ready to play.

The Beta Test

It is important that we iron out all the bugs before we release into early access. The beta test will take place in the month before release, though we do not yet have an exact date. If you backed on this tier you will be given a game key that allows you to install the game before release.

Steam Page

The “Coming Soon” steam page for the game has been made live to allow us to start building up interest for the game in the steam community. You can check it out here:

It goes a bit more into detail about the early access plans for the game. As a result of the steam page going live we will soon be sending out the rest of our surveys on Kickstarter and will begin sending keys out to backers.

Please note the 0.06 build of Empires of the Undergrowth is undergoing internal testing and will be available to the public when testing is complete.

Also note not all changes have been listed.

Trails have been reworked

Half of the ants assigned to a trail will now remain at the end of the trail, and when a new trail location is placed, the ants at the end of the trail will head straight to the new location. This makes the control system feel more responsive whilst maintaining the some of the natural trail behaviour.

Two new groups have been added allowing more trails.

Ant movement reworked

Ants will no longer move through one another in combat (no more weird death balls)

The front line is now a thing; you can physically block a corridor and limit attacks coming in

Ants will make constant attempts to get around one another

Larger creatures will no longer path to where they cannot reach (such as right next to a wall)

Many other changes designed to make movement feel a lot better

Massive efficiency savings, your FPS should be significantly higher (doubled in some cases)

All food values in the game have been increased by a factor of 5

This should not affect gameplay but gives us more design space to work with. A few examples:

A seed can now contain 5 to 15 food, up from 1 to 3.

Black ants cost 50 food to place a tile, and 5 food to hatch a new one.

Dig speed has been decreased by a factor of 3

It was too easy to tunnel out huge areas and this change should lead to more thoughtful tunnelling.

Creatures will no longer pass through one another if they are near an enemy

You should no longer have large numbers of creatures on the same spot moving slowly after a battle, additionally creatures cannot push through each other to reach the front line.

Right clicking a call to arms will no longer remove it

You must use the interface button to do this

All colony ants will regenerate health slowly (player only)

All ants now regenerate health at a rate of 1 per second (queen, worker and black ant). This only applies to the player colony, and not enemy ants.

Creatures

Large balance changes for Devil’s Coach Horse Adult

Small balance changes for Beach Tiger Beetle

Beach Tiger Beetle now performs an AOE stun periodically

Food rewards from all creatures reduced

Levels

Multiple small balance changes for levels

‘Surrounded’ now prevents larger creatures from spawning until a certain time (shorter timer for harder difficulties)

This is the first in a series of monthly roundup newsletters that will point you to the location of news and interesting things about Empires of the Undergrowth and its development.

March has been an extremely busy month in the run up to EGX Rezzed. Over the course of the month the first surface biome (the beach) has come together along with enemy colonies. It is still very rough around the edges but we took it to EGX Rezzed and received some extremely positive feedback and plenty of suggestions. There is a video on the way showing our experience at EGX Rezzed so keep an eye out for that.

What follows are links and short descriptions of interesting things that we have shown this month (also those from last month as we are catching up).

I hope you all had a splendid break and the return to work has not been too bad. Our year has started with a mix of code optimisation, improvements to combat systems and planning the year ahead.

EGX Rezzed

With that in mind Empires of the Undergrowth will be at EGX Rezzed in London on March 30th to April 1st.

We will be showcasing surface gameplay features as well as a range of new creatures. Additionally we will be testing out multiple ant species at this event too, so if you happen to be in the area, come and see us! More about this later in the year.

Optimisations

So what do we mean about optimisation? Well put simply we want you to be able to build more ants! There will of course be a limit on the amount you may build, but we want that limit to be as high as possible, so you really feel like you have a thriving colony.

This has meant Matt has had a proper poke around in Unreal Engine’s movement systems and is implementing our own movement routines, these are specific to our ants’ needs and should help us pump out those extra frames per second.

Abilities

One of our goals has always to be to show the variety of things that different ant species can do. Ant games in the past tended to have a generic ant, maybe branching into sub-types of worker, soldier, super soldier etc, but we wanted to do something different and try to show off some of the true range in nature.

John has been putting together a creature ability system that allows us to produce a lot of different types of ant and other creatures efficiently. We do not want to write completely new code each time we want a creature to jump for example and so there has to be a way to make variety quickly, and balance it so it still works in the game.

Music

Music is an important piece of any computer game, especially in Empires of the Undergrowth where the tempo helps to set the pace of play. Liam is currently working on a dynamic audio system that should adapt the musical atmosphere to match the action on the screen. We are in unfamiliar territory with this one, and we really don’t know what the end result will be, but the basic tunes are already coming together nicely.

2017 is going to be an exciting time for Empires of the Undergrowth, Make sure you have followed us on Twitter and Liked us on Facebook to see the game coming together.

Empires of the Undergrowth has gone through many iterations in many areas since the beginning. We began building the Unreal Engine version of the game in January this year so soon it will have been in production for a whole year, however the first builds of the game were in our own engine long ago, and the game played very differently then.

The Early Concept

The idea started as Dungeon Keeper but with ants for mobile. We went about setting up a game where you would fight subterranean wars with other colonies, tunnelling out food and growing. One of the core gameplay concepts was always to have the player focus on the bigger picture rather than individuals, after all, an ant colony is not about the individual ants themselves.

The question arose: how do you control something that is by its very nature autonomous and numerous?.. managing that would be a nightmare to master. We did not want the player to have direct control as this would defy the point of the game, the creatures should really have their own minds. We decided to automate everything they did, if an enemy appeared they would attack it, if you tunnelled into the enemy colony, your soldiers would head right for it.

Fancying the challenge, we built our own engine… Fast forward a year and a half our buggy engine is running an early build of the game but it was missing something. This subterranean warfare didn’t feel right, it wasn’t doing ants justice.

Back to the Drawing Board

The simple fact is ants don’t stay underground, they forage on the surface. Our ambition getting the best of us, we decided that is what we needed. Not a single underground, but one for each colony.

Under this system our automated attacking would play out like a Tug of War. Workers would constantly bring eggs to soldier tiles and new and new ants would be born. These ants would clash with the opponent on the surface in epic battles growing in size; the player needed to mix up their colony composition to gain an advantage, pushing the opponent back and killing their queen.

In principal this was a tried and tested game mechanic borrowing heavily from a custom map in Starcraft 2 – Desert Strike. This was manageable as well and we could bend it to fit into a campaign idea that had emerged by this point that we had fell in love with.

It was with this concept we launched our first Kickstarter which didn’t completely fall flat, but it did fall short. We were not looking for a huge amount of money, and by the end we had been seen by a lot of people, but the backing was not coming through. Something was wrong.

Do people really want a mobile version?

Ask someone who likes our game concept if they want a mobile version as well a PC and they will say yes. Ask them which one they would prefer and the answer seem to heavily favour the PC version. We used the data from the kickstarter the make a judgment on this. Looking at the backers for mobile only and PC only, it is 20 on mobile and 149 on PC. Not huge numbers but it does give you an idea.

So we cut the mobile version, and with it our own engine. We had stuck with our own engine to this point for performance reasons, in order to have so many ants running well on mobile technology, but with that requirement gone we were just making life difficult for ourselves.

And with all this changing, do we really need the controls to be so simplistic? With a mouse we can now give players more control. You could argue that this is feature creep, but until the features match what player will pay for you probably need to add more.

The pheromone marker made its first appearance in the demo we released with our second Kickstarter: A point that soldiers would be attracted to, instantly giving players a level of control but not so much that it destroyed the original bigger picture concept. Players seemed to get on well with this too. This was the first public demo build we had released and streamers had started picking it up. The system was intuitive, responsive and still felt like the ants were in control of themselves. Underground this works very well.

Making this mesh with the surface

So you haven’t played the surface have you? We made a test build for the surface just before EGX and we took it along to see what people thought (some will have played it but not many).

The controls worked, but it was not right. With such a wide open space and with groups of ants hovering around a single point it felt a bit strange. Almost too much like a standard strategy game and less autonomous. What was great in the tight corridors of the nest was falling a bit flat above ground.

Enter trails

In nature ants will wander to and from the nest, feeding other ants on their way if they find a food source thus reinforcing a route that leads to food. Our game being more fast paced than a simulation we wanted a way to replicate this but in a short space of time.

The first iteration of trails is what you see in the 0.0561 build you can download. Ants will head to a point, wander around the point for a few seconds and then head back to the nest. The amount of ants heading to the point is based on the number you have assigned to it and the distance from the colony. It essentially tries to balance the number of ants ant each point of the trail. We built in a mechanism to prevent the player having control where, if you place a new point down, ants must return to the nest before heading to the new point. In principle this should mean when you place a new point, the flow of ants coming from the nest go to the new point so it is still fairly responsive but what we found was when players had few ants (less than about 50) the system felt frustrating. Quite a few liked the system, but quite a few others did not, and we can very much see why. As a developer I have been playing the game constantly as I change things, training myself to think in the new systems and understanding them intrinsically. The updated systems were not intuitive and some people flat out thought they were broken.

What is next?

We did a further iteration of the system. We wanted it to feel more responsive but we are trying to avoid something quite specific. Imagine you have a trail of ants going back and forth and you change the end point they are heading to, the whole trail changes direction at once. This looks and feels bad and is not at all like ants.

The latest implementation maintains a number of ants at the end of the trail, and as a new one arrives, one heads home. This keeps a fighting force ready to attack. These ants at the end also respond to new markers being placed and will head to them. Ants on their way or coming back from a trail will remain doing so. In this way we have trails going back and forth, but the system also feels responsive

As we move on with the game we will be revisiting the controls, and we want to get this new system into your hands as soon as possible so we can get feedback. I think you will agree it is much improved we will continue to improve upon it as the game develops

Perhaps the most divisive thing we added in the recent demo was the introduction of trails. This means ants will head to your marker, and then head home from there. If they start heading to a marker they will reach it then return before going elsewhere even if you move the marker.

Part of our design philosophy has been to have the player control the big picture and be less concerned with individual movement. The controls were designed to promote this colony building focus, and be less about high speed plays.

Whilst we feel trails do help achieve this they are admittedly a little unresponsive which can be frustrating (especially if an enemy moves) whilst your colony is still small. On top of this the way they work is not particularly intuitive which has lead to some people believing it to be buggy.

This is a work in progress and it might take a couple more iterations until everyone is happy with the control system. We have been toying with a alternative few concepts which keep the basic idea of ants forming trails, but with more obvious reactions from the ants when you give them new destinations.

Difficulty

Currently the only level with difficulty settings is the new Surrounded level. These settings change the amount, type and aggressiveness of creatures that attack you however they do not make the creatures weaker or stronger; creature stats remain the same but you get attacked by more of them.

A problem has arisen with this approach. Enemies turn into food when they die which is great, however it causes a situation where the more enemies we are sending at the player, the more resources they receive. This escalates to the point where harder modes can actually be easier.

The amount of food available is a delicate stat to play with. On one hand it is nice to give a reward for defeating a big creature, on the other hand once you get past a certain point defeating a big creature becomes easy and your colony grows exponentially; your massive food stores are full and you can go to bed and let your colony deal with itself.

You could play pretty infinitely as it only got harder to a point. Thanks to Ingenious Clown on twitter for the image. https://twitter.com/ingeniousclown

This reduced risk takes the joy out of the reward. It is something we will continue to monitor carefully but for now there are a couple of things that will lessen the problem.

Firstly a drop in the food reward will bring things more into balance. Additionally the game can get harder by increasing the frequency of pack spawns, and also the sizes of the larger packs to increase the risk of the kill (currently only 1 Tiger beetle will ever spawn at a time). The level currently peaks difficulty at 30 mins, we can change that also.

The larger creatures of the game or the Titans (we haven’t added any yet) will always be fought individually and so harder game modes will require their stats altering.